The New Economics Foundation are well known for their outlandish policy prescriptions and for their extreme reluctance to use economics to support them. This is all entertaining stuff but they have now decided to dip their feet into the climate change waters, with a new paper that purports to show that climate scientists are much better at predicting the future than economists.

They may well be right, but I was struck by some of the evidence they have used to support this view. They have taken some of the IPCC's predictions, apparently from the Second Assessment Report, and have tracked them against subsequent observations. Take the temperature one for example:

It's instructive to take a look at this post at Watts Up With That?, which looks at the predictions of each of the IPCC assessments and notes that SAR makes the coolest prediction of temperature increase and still came out too warm by quite a long way.

I'm not sure that nef picking the IPCC's best performing prediction and holding it up as representative is what you might call a credible assessment of climatologists' abilities.